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Macro-dynamic Environments of the Meso Realm

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Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 3

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Abstract

This chapter visualizes the macrorealm of social reality as a sociocultural environment of corporate and categoric units of the mesolevel realm. This environment imposes constraints on the operation of groups, organizations, communities, and categoric units. These constraints can be cultural, revolving around technologies, traditions, texts, values, ideologies, generalized symbolic media, and norms, or structural, revolving around the patterns of social relations evident in institutional domains, stratification systems, societies, and even intersocietal systems. Generalized symbolic media are given special emphasis because these are the media that are used in discourse and ideological formation within institutional domains (e.g., economy, kinship, religion, and education), the valued resources that are unequally distributed, and the resources exchanged among individual and collective actors within and between institutional domains. At a more structural level, modes of integration among social units are emphasized, and depending upon the configuration of these modes used, the environment of corporate and categoric units will vary. Modes of integration include segmentation, structural differentiation, structural interdependencies (e.g., exchange, overlaps, mobility, and embedding), structural domination, and structural segregation. Emphasis is placed upon how environments at the macrolevel of social reality evolve under selection pressures upon actors to solve problems facing a population.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     It could be argued that even nomadic hunter-gatherers had incipient community structures because they almost always had a sense of their home range and of the bands that “belonged” in this range. And early in societal evolution, community appeared when hunter-gatherers began to settle down, perhaps in temporary locations but eventually for good.

  2. 2.

     For references on the emergence and operation of status beliefs, see: Berger 1958; Berger et. al. 1972, 1977, 1980; Berger and Conner 1969; Berger and Zelditch 1985; Ridgeway 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006; Ridgeway et al. 1998, 2009; Ridgeway and Berger 1986, 1988; Ridgeway and Correll 2004; Ridgeway and Erickson 2000.

  3. 3.

     It is rather remarkable how the new institutionalism has come to dominate organizational analysis, but perhaps even more remarkable is the lack of criticism from “old institutionalists” about the limitation of institutional theorizing in the field of organizations. For a sampling of basic references in the new institutionalism, see DiMaggio (1986), DiMaggio and Powell (1983), Powell and DiMaggio (1991), Fligstein (1990, 1996), Jepperson (1991), Meyer and Rowan (1977), Hirsch (1997), Hodgson (1996), Scott and Meyer (1983), Zucker (1988), Scott (1987, 2005, 2008), Scott and Christensen (1995), Thornton (2004), and Tolbert and Zucker (1996). On the other side, there have been relatively few critiques of this larger literature on the new institutionalism. Among the few critiques, see Friedland and Alford (1991) and Abrutyn and Turner (2011).

  4. 4.

     See volume 1 of Theoretical Principles of Sociology (2010: 41–104) for a review of these forces. For earlier statements, see: Turner (1995: 1–75), (2003:23–56).

  5. 5.

     The more structural and cultural variation evident in a sociocultural formation, the more selection has something to work on. Conversely, the less variation, the less selection has to select on, if pressures for change arise. Moreover, cultural systems with little variation are often rigid and inflexible, especially if they have been highly moralized. Conversely, when cultural systems have a great deal of variation, they are generally less rigid, and thus, even if existing variants are not fitness enhancing, they are less likely to inhibit efforts at innovation by actors responding to selection pressures.

  6. 6.

     Critical theorists like Jurgen Habermas (1972) and some postmodernists argue that this circulation of money and other, in Habermas’ terms, “delinguistified media,” colonize the lifeworld of actors and disrupt if not destroy what is meaningful in other noneconomic domains. I think that these theorists overdo this claim because it is clear to me, at least, that the symbolic media of domains in which cooler media also circulate seem to sustain their cultures and traditions. Moreover, in the spirit of Simmel (1978[1907]), these critical theorists underestimate the integrative effects of media like money, as I have also emphasized in a somewhat different way than Simmel. Generalized symbolic media and their cultures become mixed and often equivalent, thereby giving people common worldviews and hence ability to form meaningful relationships with diverse actors within and between institutional domains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Jonathan H. Turner

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Turner, J.H. (2012). Macro-dynamic Environments of the Meso Realm. In: Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 3. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6221-8_2

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